Books received 8/18/13

Let’s take a quick look to see what’s arrived at the Geek Compound.

The Waking Dark

by Robin Wasserman
Cover by Ian Sanderson

 Promo copy:

A taut, haunting read, The Waking Dark is “a horror story worthy of Stephen King” (Booklist) and will appeal to the readers of Gillian Flynn and Rick Yancey.

They called it the killing day. Twelve people dead, all in the space of a few hours. Five murderers: neighbors, relatives, friends. All of them so normal. All of them seemingly harmless. All of them now dead by their own hand . . . except one. And that one has no answers to offer the shattered town. She doesn’t even know why she killed—or whether she’ll do it again.

Something is waking in the sleepy town of Oleander’s, Kansas—something dark and hungry that lives in the flat earth and the open sky, in the vengeful hearts of upstanding citizens. As the town begins its descent into blood and madness, five survivors of the killing day are the only ones who can stop Oleander from destroying itself. Jule, the outsider at war with the world; West, the golden boy at war with himself; Daniel, desperate for a different life; Cass, who’s not sure she deserves a life at all; and Ellie, who believes in sacrifice, fate, and in evil. Ellie, who always goes too far. They have nothing in common. They have nothing left to lose. And they have no way out. Which means they have no choice but to stand and fight, to face the darkness in their town—and in themselves.

Continue reading

Rayguns Over Texas preview: Aurelia Hadley Mohl

Cover by Rocky Kelley

Cover by Rocky Kelley

As we barrel toward the August 29 premiere of Rayguns Over Texas at LoneStarCon 3 (aka the 71st Annual World Science Fiction Convention) in San Antonio, I am presenting book excerpts, one contributor per day.

Today’s selection comes from Aurelia Hadley Mohl‘s “An Afternoon’s Nap, or; Five Hundred Years Ahead.” Continue reading

Snobbery and lower literary forms

Conversations with Texas Writers

While researching something else entirely, I ran across a scathing review of Conversations With Texas Writers from the Winter 2006 issue of Great Plains Quarterly (#26:1 for those who are counting) by Don B. Graham of the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin.

(Full disclosure time: I interviewed Joe R. Lansdale and Bruce Sterling in Conversations.)

While I agree with some of Graham’s assessments especially the book’s lack of focus, I, not surprisingly, have serious issues with his elitist attitude regarding genre writers.

Another problem is that genre writers are accorded the stature of Flaubert or Dostoevsky. This is perhaps the inevitable result of posing questions to an author of young-adult fiction or adult crime novels: the very, act of treating such authors seriously, as artists, produces what we might call the Fog of Literature. All writers are good on the subject of their own fiction, poetry, drama, whatever; indeed, everybody sounds like Tolstoy when asked about their intentions, their influences, their feelings.

Continue reading

Books received 8/12/13

Let’s take a quick look to see what’s arrived at the Geek Compound.

The Exodus Towers
The Dire Earth Cycle: Two

by Jason M. Hough
Cover by Christian McGrath

Promo copy:

The Exodus Towers features all the high-octane action and richly imagined characters of The Darwin Elevator—but the stakes have never been higher.
 
The sudden appearance of a second space elevator in Brazil only deepens the mystery about the aliens who provided it: the Builders. Scavenger crew captain Skyler Luiken and brilliant scientist Dr. Tania Sharma have formed a colony around the new Elevator’s base, utilizing mobile towers to protect humans from the Builders’ plague. But they are soon under attack from a roving band of plague-immune soldiers. Cut off from the colony, Skyler must wage a one-man war against the new threat as well as murderous subhumans and thugs from Darwin—all while trying to solve the puzzle of the Builders’ master plan . . . before it’s too late for the last vestiges of humanity.

Continue reading